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Web of Trust makes Chrome even safer

Posted on 19 Aug 2010 at 16:33

Davey Winder takes a look at a community weaving a web of trust

Whenever a hashed URL fragment matches, Chrome asks Google’s servers for the full list of those URLs and warns the user if it determines the site they are about to visit is potentially dodgy.

Okay, you’ve taken my advice and installed Chrome, but there’s another bit of browser help that I’d suggest taking advantage of a safe browsing tool.

Even safer

But haven’t I just told you that Chrome has such a feature fitted as standard? Indeed I did, but in this case I believe the standard tool can be helped by a Chrome extension that bolsters those dangerous site warnings.

You could take up any of the many security vendor options – some free and some commercial – although not all will work with Chrome.

Some, such as McAfee SiteAdvisor, do have Chrome extensions available and work by sending a web crawler to scan sites looking for potentially unsafe practices.

However, my current favourite for using with Chrome is the Web of Trust (WOT), which offers the best of both worlds. It has a partnership with Panda Security, which adds vendor malware and phishing databases into its open community ratings system, plus a sprinkling of checks made with the likes of Wikipedia and Digg.

With a million new sites being rated every month, that’s probably close to 30 million by the time you read this

With a million new sites being rated every month, that’s probably close to 30 million by the time you read this.

WOT doesn’t claim to be able to rate every site on the web – that would tax even Google – but it does cover a pretty large swathe of the web, and that swathe is growing all the time courtesy of its “wisdom of crowds” approach, which consolidates ratings from many different agents.

How it works

The fact it works with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox as well as Microsoft Internet Explorer, and is free of charge, all help too.

Sites are rated for child safety (although that isn’t a substitute for parental responsibility and supervision), for privacy, reliability and trustworthiness, and the results are presented in an easy to understand traffic light notation, but with an option for colour-blind users to see something different.

Just hover your mouse over the traffic light icon in any Google search and the concise ratings will be displayed: click on it and you’ll get taken to a more detailed page of analysis.

While browsing, any red alerts will pop up a warning in the browser, and you can also check site status via a toolbar icon. What I like is that WOT is resource light, which means that the super-speedy Chrome browser isn’t slowed down by using it.

I also appreciate its community ratings aspect, which in terms of trust feels right to me – it balances out any dependency upon a security vendor database.

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